


Council Business

by EntreNous



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Cleveland, Domestic, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Research, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-20
Updated: 2005-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-27 07:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/659313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EntreNous/pseuds/EntreNous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The members of the Research Committee are impressed.  Giles is convinced.  Buffy is bamboozled.  Dawn is off to Cleveland."  Dawn stays with Xander while she researches the Cleveland Hellmouth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Council Business

The official reason Dawn gets to go to Cleveland is Council business. 

Unofficially? She’s trying to get away from everything that comes after high school. Buffy keeps going on and on about how Dawn needs to apply to top universities now that it’s been a year since she’s graduated with honors from the American School in Rome. But every time Dawn reluctantly takes out the piles of brochures and catalogues, Buffy starts acting extra unobtrusive on purpose, as though it isn’t totally obvious she’s way invested in what Dawn studies and where. 

“How about that one?” Buffy will say brightly, startling Dawn by popping up out of nowhere. When Dawn shrieks in surprise, Buffy laughs nervously then raises her hands and backs away slowly to show that she didn’t say anything, she isn’t even here, and this is _all_ Dawn’s decision. 

Dawn gets it, she does. Buffy’s college time was cut short, and Dawn hates that Buffy had to leave school. Now there are Slayers to round up and a global network of people to manage, and when Buffy talks about dorms and libraries and parties there’s a wistful note in her voice that makes Dawn’s heart hurt a little. But she knows she can’t just pick any old place only to make Buffy feel better.

So she takes a few weeks to do some research. Buffy is suspicious, but the hints that Dawn lets slip about ivy-covered walls and potential pining for drama classes throw her off the trail. At the end of the time, Dawn presents Giles and the rest of the Research Committee with a forty page Power Point report, complete with bullet points, pie charts, and hand outs. 

Her proposal is that even though the Council has a bureau in Cleveland, everyone’s assuming that the Hellmouth there will work just like the Sunnydale one. But what if the Cleveland center of mystical energy is different? How can they know if they don’t study it comparatively, considering the city’s origins and its records of its development? And what would a different kind of Hellmouth mean for a new generation of slayers and watchers?

The members of the Research Committee are impressed. Giles is convinced. Buffy is bamboozled. Dawn is off to Cleveland. 

* * *

The deal Dawn makes with Buffy is that Dawn gets to stay in Cleveland for a whole year. She’ll check out operations of the Slayer center there that Xander helps oversee, and research the history of the city and its Hellmouth. Both of those projects will give her the material to draw conclusions and put together a new report for the Council. 

Meanwhile, she agrees to Buffy’s conditions. In her free time she’s supposed to be looking at colleges and planning campus visits. And in a year’s time, after Dawn gives the Research Committee her Hellmouth findings, she’ll have to give Buffy a list of ten schools that she’s ready to apply to. 

Sure, poking around a Hellmouth, looking at musty city records, and interviewing girls who fight demons isn’t what everyone does when they’re taking off some time before college. But never having been normal takes care of Dawn worrying too hard about things like that. 

The best part of the time in Cleveland, though, is staying with Xander. She arrives and crashes at his guest room as they had arranged in advance. The first few days she’s groggy with jet lag. Xander comes and goes quietly initially, then after a while drags her out of bed at daylight to get on the schedule of her new time zone by watching cartoons and eating breakfast. His cabinets are a treasure trove of sugary cereals, and Dawn declares that now she knows why she missed living in the United States. 

Xander’s apartment is only supposed to be her base of operations for a week or so while she finds a place. But so far, she doesn’t see any reason to leave. Giles keeps telling her just to rent her own flat -- the Council will pay for it all as part of the grant they’ve given her. But why should she be in a rush to move out? Xander doesn’t seem to mind having her. So she tells herself not to feel too guilty about taking over his guest room, his medicine cabinet, and pretty much the whole place. 

Of course, that means that she has to ignore the part where she doesn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt about any of it.

* * *

Cleveland is a little weird after living in Europe. Dawn keeps checking herself so she doesn’t appear shocked when the Watchers here speak without English accents. The Slayers seem cool enough, but it isn’t like the instant-friendship forming that happened when she had to live with a house full of them in Sunnydale. They all have a set schedule of programs and training and school, and Dawn’s research is a separate thing she does on her own. She isn’t sure if she’ll ever end up getting to know them really well.

But delving into the records is even cooler than she thought it would be, and staying with Xander is so great, especially after not seeing him much at all for a few years. She’s getting used to living in a new place, and after having three phone conversations with Buffy after which she doesn’t cry afterward, she starts to think that she’s doing fine on her own. 

Then she wakes one night with terror sweeping through her like a crash of cold waves. Before she knows it, she’s standing just inside Xander’s bedroom, clutching the doorway hard to keep upright. She thinks only for a second that she should turn around and head back to the guest room before she decides that Xander wouldn’t mind, not if he knew she was this scared. Besides, she’ll go back to her own room before he wakes up, and he’ll never even find out it happened. 

When she crawls into Xander’s bed, he doesn’t wake up all the way. But he does make an inquisitive noise when the mattress dips. 

“Bad dream,” she whispers, and that seems to satisfy his semi-conscious state. He murmurs something and flops over onto his stomach while she gingerly arranges the covers so she can grab some of the blankets for herself without disturbing him too much.

She doesn’t fall sleep, but it makes her feel better, lying there with someone else, listening to him breathe in and out. At one point during the night he mumbles a few words -- one of them sounds like “rebar.” She takes a deep breath, prepared to explain what she’s doing there if he opens his eyes. He doesn’t stir again. 

She breathes in a second time, more deeply, when she realizes that he smells nice -- sleepy and warm, with undertones of soap and sweat. The guy-ness of it all is new to her. Buffy always smells a little sweet at night, lingering perfume from the day or citrus-scented after-shower lotion. Her mom used to smell like the balm she put on her feet and elbows before she went to bed. 

They’re really the only ones she’s ever slept in the same bed with, Buffy and her mom. Buffy had always grumbled about sharing, but then she would pat Dawn’s arm reassuringly before going out cold again a moment later. Her mom often woke up with a small smile, smoothing Dawn’s hair out of her face gently or tucking her in with an extra blanket. 

It’s when the difference of this situation hits her -- she’s actually lying in bed with _Xander_ \-- that she wakes up all at once. She climbs out of the bed and returns to the guest room. In the early morning she slips out the front door before Xander comes into the kitchen, and she makes sure that she doesn’t come back to the apartment until late.

* * *

So far Xander has been great, not only about Dawn staying with him, but also helping her adjust to the new city. He takes her shopping for basics, helps her get her driver’s license, and, as per her instructions, stands behind her looking skeptical and slightly dangerous while she haggles with a dealer to buy a used car. 

He even exclaims enthusiastically over her lame attempts at cooking dinner when he comes home from meetings. “This is great. Way better than what I would have nuked,” he says with his mouth full of tuna-pickle-noodle-something that she’d invented.

What he hasn’t been, however, is free to help her investigate what she told Giles she’d find out: how the Cleveland Hellmouth is different from the Sunnydale one. He’s busy training his slayers and acting as official liaison to the main branch of the Council. 

That’s okay, though, because she has lots of neat archival stuff that she gets to do on her own, way different from the standard research sessions that the watchers put into play when there’s a whiff of a prophecy afoot. Hanging out all day in quiet dark rooms, sitting at long oak tables with her pencils, sharpener, and stack of notepads in front of her, scrolls and records to her left and right -- it relaxes her after the danger of Sunnydale in its last days and after the giddiness of living in Rome with Buffy.

Researching is definitely cooler now that she’s learning more languages. It’s even more fun when she knows she’s going to be returning to Xander’s apartment every night when she’s finished. She and Xander watch movies together some nights, gossip about the crew of slayers and their watchers stationed in Cleveland other times, or just hang out and talk about nothing in the living room until it’s getting really late, and they’re trading yawns and sheepish grins. 

On weekends he usually offers to drive her around. When she insists on taking her car, he tries to hide his invisible-brake pressing, but she waves him off and cheerfully ignores the grimaces. Sometimes they end up heading to the mall, and even though he groans at the prospect of shopping, he’s good at the following, waiting around, and purse-holding kind of thing. She’s brushing her teeth one night and thinks about calling Buffy or Willow as a joke, to thank them for making Xander dressing-room ready for her. But she quickly decides that they wouldn’t get it, and lets the idea go. 

“Don’t forget to actually research schools and make plans to visit the campuses,” Buffy warns whenever she calls. “I know you’re having fun living with Xander, but that’s not the main reason you’re there, okay?”

“The main reason I’m here is the Hellmouth research,” Dawn tells her in a lofty voice.

Buffy sighs. “Oh, and make sure you’re eating right -- I don’t want you living on the patented Harris all-snack-food diet.”

“Buffy, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m not a kid anymore, and I totally wouldn’t do that.” She hangs up after they’ve blown kisses to each other and puts away the brownies she’d planned on serving for dinner. When Xander gets home there’s macaroni and cheese with chick peas and a bunch of croutons and olives that she threw on top at the last minute. The grin he gives her when he sees the hastily set table and the hot casserole dish is wide and bright. 

* * *

A few days pass, then a few weeks, and she manages to sleep just fine. The idea of having to get into bed with someone else because of a creepy dream seems silly now.

Meanwhile, she realizes that the guest room isn’t any different than when she moved into it. There’s a basic double bed, a simple wood dresser that Xander had built and stained, and a night table with a lamp. So she hangs a poster on the wall, only afterwards wondering if she should have asked first. But when he notices the print, Xander offers to make a frame for it, so she figures it’s fine that she settles in a little more. 

A night or two later she stops by a discount store on the way home from the city library. As she’s about to grab a set of beads to hang in the open-doorway closet, she pauses. She’s not sure why, because they’d be cool, and definitely would make the guest room seem more like her own room. But it feels wrong buying them somehow, so she shrugs and heads home. Thursdays are pizza nights, and she wants to make sure that Xander remembers to order her pie with anchovies.

* * *

That night she’s startled awake. Running, she’d been running as fast as she could even though it wasn’t fast enough, running into darkness. The ground had mired her down, started to swallow her up, earth filling her mouth and choking her. 

She sits up in bed, breathing hard, and she doesn’t get to the stage of thinking it through before she’s standing and stumbling towards the nearest source of comfort.

Xander’s lying on his side, facing the empty half of the mattress. Funny, but he hasn’t spread out on the whole thing, the way most people do when they have big beds. Right now, though, she’s just glad of it; there’s more than enough space for her. After a moment’s hesitation, she gets in bed, shivering but trying not to jostle him with too much movement.

No curious noise from Xander as she scoots in, and she assumes he’s sleeping more deeply than the last time, the only time, this happened. A minute later, though, he shifts closer and stops, as though attempting to figure out what this other source of heat is doing in his bed. She can feel him reach out while she lays still. When he drapes an arm around her waist, he sighs, a pleased noise, and pulls her a bit closer.

She should get up. It isn’t a good idea, staying here like this, and when he wakes up Xander will probably freak out at finding her in his bed. But it’s warm, and the guy-scent of him she remembered from the other night seems familiar and comforting now. Her eyes drift closed. 

When she wakes up there’s light outlining the edges of the shades on the windows. They’re spooned together, his hand resting loosely just below her breasts, his hard-on pressed against her. He’s snoring lightly. 

She starts to slip out of the bed, and he reaches after her blindly. She freezes for a moment when his fingers rest on the curve of her hip, on the bare skin between her t-shirt and shorts. 

But when she whispers “It’s okay,” his breathing quickly evens out, and his fingertips slip off. She makes it out of the room without him ever opening his eyes. 

She heads back to the guest bedroom, leaning against the door after she closes it behind her.

* * *

After she’s dressed, she gets her folders and materials together so she can look into some of the records that she’s ordered on microfilm. She’s edging out the door when she hears Xander call out “Morning,” from the kitchen.

“Hey,” she says as she pokes her head in. She forces what she hopes looks like an easy smile.

“Wow, you are way too cheerful considering how early it is,” he tells her. All the same, he’s grinning back, and now she’s smiling for real. “Want a pop tart?”

“Think I’ll pass this time,” she says lightly. She watches him pour himself coffee. “You know how it goes. Eat a pop tart, and you’re happy and buzzed, but then you get that whole sugar crash thing going, and then it’s all, ‘oh no, I fell asleep on the census scrolls, and the rare books librarian won’t let me look at the town charter.’ ”

“I bet that’ll make sense once I have more of this,” he responds, gesturing at her with his mug and sloshing some coffee onto the floor.

Even though he just said she was too cheerful, she notices that as he’s making his way over to the kitchen table, he’s whistling. She can’t resist asking. 

“Sleep okay?” she inquires.

“I slept great,” Xander says seriously. He sips the coffee as he takes a seat, and then sighs in contentment. “You know . . . I might have slept the best I have yet, since I moved to this wacky Midwestern city. I don’t know why exactly, but I sure hope--”

“I have to go,” she tells him abruptly. He raises his eyebrows, but he doesn’t protest.

Outside, she sits in her car, trying to sort out all of what’s happening in her head. She could call Buffy. She could go buy the beads for the closet door. She could drive for hours to get to the east coast and spend the week visiting colleges.

Then she laughs out loud, and starts the engine. She sings along with the radio all the way to the Cleveland Records Office.


End file.
